Items Tagged: Hybrid

Taneja Group always seems to be years ahead of other analyst firms when it comes to nailing down trends in the market. We find their advice technically sound and business savvy. Little wonder that IT pays attention when they speak.

VDI has often promised more than it delivered, due to stubborn complexity, performance and cost challenges. Chief among these challenges has been the high up-front capital costs and subsequent inefficiencies of the storage platforms deployed to support it. Building on deep integration with VMware’s vSphere 4.1 platform via the vStorage APIs, Dell has set its sights squarely on VDI and aims to break down both the cost of acquisition and TCO (CapEx and OpEx) barriers that have plagued VDI ROI in the past. Dell has added intelligent workload tiering and new hybrid SSD/SAS arrays to its Equal-Logic PS Series family and we analyze a recent performance benchmark to evaluate in detail how Dell’s innovations reduce complexity, improve performance and lower the cost of VDI.

Maximizing Database Performance With Dell Equallogic Hybrid Arrays

Today’s combination of rapidly-accelerating demand for data and rapidly-consolidating datacenter infrastructure makes choosing the right storage for each of your business applications more important—and more difficult—than ever. In our view, it’s time more of this burden is taken on by the SAN itself. In other words, it’s time for more SAN intelligence. The intelligent SAN should optimize all available storage resources—automatically. In this profile explore how dynamic, multi-tiered OLTP workloads test the limits of traditional manual storage tiering strategies, and further strengthen the case for automated tiering on the SAN itself. Then we review Dell’s internal benchmark test results and speak to Carnival Cruise Lines, an EqualLogic customer, in order to evaluate how Dell’s hybrid SSD/SAS arrays are delivering higher performance and lower overhead both in the lab and in the field.

What you’ll learn in this tip: In his latest Storage magazine column, Jeff Byrne, senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group, shares his thoughts on why a hybrid cloud model may be the right solution for those skeptical about turning to the cloud. He also explains why, despite their strengths, hybrid clouds still need a significant amount of development—such as performance as it relates to critical applications.

Riverbed Optimization for the Cloud – Weaving together the connectivity behind the hybrid cloud

There’s little doubt today that the concept of cloud is an irresistible force that is altering the landscape upon which IT systems are built and integrated. The fact is, the cloud is already here in data centers today, as the footprint of IT has rapidly changed and is quickly becoming a mix of services drawn from both public and private clouds. Whether it is by a small degree, or a large degree, the potential of using many of this first generation of Internet-scattered, public cloud services has opportunistically drawn in many users, even within the most stoic and unchangeable of institutions. In this Solution Brief, we’ll examine how one vendor – Riverbed – is turning their technology to the integration of these cloud services with the traditional infrastructure; an area where they are particularly enabled to deliver with their rich history of optimizing connectivity and capabilities across systems scattered around the globe.

Remote and branch office (ROBO) storage presents unique challenges to enterprise IT and storage professionals. Meeting the needs of dispersed end-users with limited on-site IT support while managing growth in capacity, taming complexity, and keeping costs under control is a daunting task. The larger the number of remote sites, the bigger the challenge becomes.

However, a new approach is redefining ROBO storage deployments. It leverages both cloud and local storage, resulting in significant cost reduction and simplified management while providing end-users with fast access to files, easy recovery of backups and the ability to share files both locally and in the cloud.

Join storage analysts from Taneja Group and CTERA in this December 2012 on-demand webcast as they explore a comprehensive approach to ROBO storage and discuss:

*ROBO end-user storage needs vs. corporate IT considerations
*Pros and cons of alternative approaches to managing ROBO storage, including: Traditional approaches employing local file servers and tape backup, as well as remote backup, WAN optimization, and cloud storage gateways
*How leveraging cloud storage technology integrated with managed local storage appliances can optimize cost, performance and management overhead
*How this approach can scale to many thousands of sites, providing speedy deployment, centralized management and ease of use for ROBO end users.

Why should you consider using cloud storage for at least some of your data and applications? Well, unless you've been living under a rock for the past six years, you probably have a good idea of the potential advantages that cloud-enabled storage can offer.

Top Performance on Mixed Workloads, Unbeatable for Oracle Databases

There is a storm brewing in IT today that will upset the core ways of doing business with standard data processing platforms. This storm is being fueled by inexorable data growth, competitive pressures to extract maximum value and insight from data, and the inescapable drive to lower costs through unification, convergence, and optimization. The storage market in particular is ripe for disruption. Surprisingly, that storage disruption may just come from a current titan only seen by many as primarily an application/database vendor —Oracle.

When Oracle bought Sun in 2009, one of the areas of expertise brought over was in ZFS, a “next generation” file system. While Oracle clearly intended to compete in the enterprise storage market, some in the industry thought that the acquisition would essentially fold any key IP into narrow solutions that would only effectively support Oracle enterprise workloads. And in fact, Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances have been successfully and stealthily moving into more and more data centers as the DBA-selected best option for “database” and “database backup” specific storage.

But the truth is that Oracle has continued aggressive development on all fronts, and its ZFS Storage Appliance is now extremely competitive as scalable enterprise storage, posting impressive benchmarks topping other comparative solutions. What happens when support for mixed workloads is also highly competitive? The latest version of Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances, the new ZS3 models, become a major contender as a unified, enterprise featured, and affordable storage platform for today’s data center, and are positioned to bring Oracle into enterprise storage architectures on a much broader basis going forward.

In this report we will take a look at the new ZS3 Series and examine how it delivers both on its “application engineered” premise and its broader capabilities for unified storage use cases and workloads of all types. We’ll briefly examine the new systems and their enterprise storage features, especially how they achieve high performance across multiple use cases. We’ll also explore some of the key features engineered into the appliance that provide unmatched support for Oracle Database capabilities like Automatic Data Optimization (ADO) with Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) which provides heat map driven storage tiering. We’ll also review some of the key benchmark results and provide an indication of the TCO factors driving its market leading price/performance.

GRIDSTORE, the leader in optimized storage for Windows Servers and Hyper-V that accelerates application I/O, today announced early access for GRIDSTORE 3.0, a revolutionary new software-defined storage (SDS) solution, architected to deliver improved application performance and the industry's first and only TrueQoS (True Quality of Service) in a pay-as-you-scale format.

Improving the data center to keep up with advancing technologies has been the chief, perennial responsibility of CIOs over the years. These days, however, the job has taken on a new twist as new questions arise: Is the data center the best platform to boost enterprise productivity? Do we need a data center at all anymore?

The era of IT infrastructure convergence is upon us. Every major vendor has some type of offering under this category. Startups and smaller players are also "talking" convergence. But what exactly is convergence and why are all the vendors so interested in getting included in this category? We will explain below the history of convergence, what it is, what it is not, what benefits accrue from such systems, who the players are, and who is leading the pack in true convergence.

NexGen was one of the first real flash/hybrid with QoS storage solutions, and it leveraged PCIe flash (i.e. Fusion-IO cards) to great effect. Which we suppose had something to do with why Fusion-IO bought them up a couple of years ago. But whatever plans were in the works were likely messed up when SanDisk in-turn bought Fusion-IO because we haven't heard form NexGen folks in awhile - not a good sign for a storage solution. Well, SanDisk has now spun NexGen back out on its own. While it may be sink or swim time for the NexGen team, we think it's a good opportunity for all involved.